The present invention relates to a portable terminal system including a portable terminal capable of performing RF communication (i.e. radio frequency communication) with a RFID tag (i.e. radio frequency ID tag) and operating under an operating power supplied from a battery, and a portable terminal mounting base capable of performing data communication with an external apparatus and having an arrangement to mount the portable terminal.
For example, the unexamined Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2001-52105 discloses a composite code reading apparatus which reads data from a RFID tag attached or printed on an objective article or product to be administrated and transmits the data read out from the RFID tag to an external apparatus.
However, the composite code reading apparatus disclosed in the above-described prior art document has complicated hardware arrangement because one interface is provided to read data from the RFID tag and another interface is separately provided to transmit the data read out from the RFID tag to the external apparatus.
According to the portable terminal system, a portable terminal having the capability of reading a RFID tag is placed on a portable terminal mounting base (hereinafter, referred to as a mounting base). When the portable terminal is placed on the mounting base, the data having been read from the RFID tag into the portable terminal is transmitted from the portable terminal to the mounting base. The data transmitted from the portable terminal to the mounting base is further transmitted from the mounting base to the host computer. The data having been read from the RFID tag into the portable terminal is thus transmitted from the portable terminal via the mounting base to the host computer.
However, this kind of portable terminal system has the same problem as that of the above-described conventional composite code reading apparatus. More specifically, the overall hardware arrangement becomes complicated because one interface is required to read the data from the RFID tag into the portable terminal and another interface is separately arranged to transmit the data of the RFID tag from the portable terminal to the mounting base.